Numbers and I have never gotten along. It started in the fourth grade. Until then, there had been no enmity between math and myself. Then Mrs. Selby, my fourth-grade teacher (and the scariest teacher I ever had) introduced us to long division. I hated long division. I wanted long division to die a painful and horrible death. No matter how many times I did it, I never got the right answer. It was completely incomprehensible to me. 

My parents did their best to help me. Night after wretched night, they tried to find a way to pound long division into my brain. The usual result of all that pounding was frayed tempers and a nine-year old in tears. Eventually enough understanding seeped in so I could move on to fifth-grade math, but I never felt like I got it. That intangible "click" just never happened.

No one was happier than yours truly when calculators were invented. Never again would I have to sit hunched miserably over a piece of scratch paper as I messed up yet again. Now I could do the calculator dance! I could punch the top number in, punch the bottom number out, hit the enter key and shake it all about! <continued below>

As wonderful as my new little friend was, there were still times it couldn't help me. I once snagged a job at a movie theater with no cash registers. This meant I had to make change. Making change was another little math fact of life that had escaped me. I took my little equation-solving friend to work and hid him in my pocket. As the customers streamed in, I whipped that puppy out and started punching for all I was worth. Unfortunately no matter how fast you can do the calculator dance, it's no match for a long line of impatient moviegoers. Finally I gave up and guessed the change. A lot of people got paid to go to the movies and eat popcorn that night. My calculator and I were fired.

As I got older, technology advanced to the point where very few people had to work out anything on paper. That suited me just fine. Then my son entered the fourth-grade and long division came back to haunt me.

He brought a work sheet home and ran into trouble. I sat down with him and prepared to work it out with him. I showed him how to divide and how to check his answer. He worked out the problem as I instructed. It was wrong. He worked it out again. It was wrong. I worked it out. It was wrong.

I began to perspire and the back of my neck started to itch. Suddenly I could feel Mrs. Selby standing behind me and glaring down at me. I could imagine what she would have to say. "Tami! You are thirty-eight years old and you STILL can't do long division? I knew I should have flunked you!" My fingers inched towards my faithful electronic friend who had solved my math problems all of these years. But I couldn't do the calculator dance. I realized that the calculator was a cheat, a shortcut for actually learning math. I could not cheat at helping my son with math. All I would be teaching him would be how to cheat too.

It's not an easy thing to tell your child that you don't know how to do something as basic as fourth-grade math when they still think you know everything. He took it so well that I suspect he has long had a clue about exactly what I know. I told him that his father, who is great with numbers, would help him when he came home. That night his father had two pupils. I behaved better than I ever did for Mrs. Selby.

Maybe it's never to late to hear that elusive "click." I don't know if I will ever boogie with math as I did the calculator, but I think I can eventually keep it from chasing me off the dance floor.

Tami Coxen lives in West Virginia with her husband of 17 years, her 2 sons and her dog. When she's not wrangling kids and chasing dogs, she writes a weekly humor column for her local paper. Tami enjoys hearing from anyone who identifies with that insanity called parenthood.